Currently, there are over 730,000 cases of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) virus and over 42,000 deaths in the United States. Many of the high-profile cases were Hollywood celebrities.
Why would the CCP virus hit Hollywood hard?
The Epoch Times editorial article, “Where Ties With Communist China Are Close, the Coronavirus Follows,” suggests that “the heaviest-hit regions outside China all share a common thread: close or lucrative relations with the communist regime in Beijing.”
From financing to approving scripts, the CCP have influenced Hollywood considerably over the past few years, and can now exert a significant sway over which films are produced and how China is portrayed.
Chinese Market = Censorship
China’s box office generated almost $9.3 billion in revenue in 2019—just behind the United States and Canada, which jointly brought in $11.4 billion, according to Motion Picture Association of America data.Experts have warned that China’s lucrative market has led to self-censorship in Hollywood to cater to what the Chinese censors want.
Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation, explained in the podcast discussion with Doescher why the Chinese regime has keyed in on Hollywood.
“The Chinese Communist Party is communist, and the communists understand very well then the culture stands upstream from policy and from politics, and if you seize the culture, you’ve gone a great way towards impacting the population,” he said.
The Trump administration, too, has spoken about self-censorship in Hollywood.
“For the movie ‘World War Z’ they had to cut the script’s mention of a virus because it originated in China. ‘Red Dawn’ was digitally edited to make the villains North Korean, not Chinese,” Pence said.
Movies Banned by the CCP
Beijing hasn’t been shy about banning certain films that are too sensitive for the regime.One such movie was “Red Corner,” a 1997 film starring Richard Gere as an American businessman falsely accused of murder in Beijing. The film had an ominous tagline: ”Leniency for those who confess, severity for those who resist.”
As a supporter of Tibetan independence and an ally of the Dalai Lama, Gere has been critical of the Chinese regime.
In a more recent example, the 2019 Netflix film “Laundromat” was banned. Directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Meryl Streep, the movie exposes corruption, including in China.
Chinese Regime Funds Hollywood’s Productions
More than half of the 10 best movies of 2019 selected by Time magazine were financed by Beijing-friendly firms, such as Tencent Pictures, Sunac Group, Shanghai Road Pictures Film and Television, Media Asia Film, and Bona Film Group.And that isn’t unusual. Many of the big cinema releases over the last few years have been made with Chinese funding.
“Terminator: Dark Fate,” released in November last year, had an estimated production budget of $185 million, with Paramount Pictures, Skydance Media, and 20th Century Fox each financing 30 percent, and Tencent Pictures 10 percent.
Chinese conglomerate Fosun International invested in the founding of Studio 8, an American entertainment company, in 2014 and was involved in the financing of movies such as “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” and “Gemini Man,” both directed by Ang Lee.
At the end of 2014, China’s largest interactive entertainment group, Guangdong Alpha Group, established a partnership with U.S. company New Regency Productions. According to Chinese media, Guangdong Alpha would invest up to $60 million in three New Regency movie productions, which included “The Revenant.”
The 2014 film “Transformers: Age of Extinction,” produced by Paramount, received investment from M1905, a new media subsidiary of the China Movie Channel (CCTV6).
Buying Up and Partnering With Studios
Chinese conglomerate Dalian Wanda acquired U.S. cinema operator AMC Entertainment for $2.6 billion in May 2012. In 2016, Wanda acquired Hollywood studio Legendary Entertainment and theater operator Carmike Cinemas. The former produced the blockbusters “Jurassic World” and “The Dark Knight.”Wang’s acquisitions, however, have the U.S. congress concerned about the regime’s growing influence on entertainment. These acquisitions are viewed as political outlets of the CCP, which are used by the regime to spread propaganda and wield cultural influence over the way the CCP is portrayed on American television and in cinema.
Dalian Wanda are not the only Chinese company to make deals with U.S. film studios.
This global pandemic—caused by the Chinese regime’s mishandling of the outbreak–has demonstrated that dealing with China carries a heavy price.
Can Hollywood—long stifled and shaped by China’s economic interests—wake up to the fact and distance itself from the Chinese regime in the future?
Only time will tell.
